The World According to the 1580s

A newly digitized map offers a rare glimpse at the way Europeans conceived of the Americas before British colonization.

By Benjamin Breen

When and where does “American history” begin? The answers to that question once began with names like Sir Walter Raleigh, Jamestown, and Plymouth Rock. More recently, those answers have changed. Now, when historians narrate the beginnings of American history, they mention places that predate British colonization altogether — places like New Mexico, or cities like San Juan, Puerto Rico (1521) and St. Augustine, Florida (1565). Going deeper in time, they could point to pre-Columbian urban centers such as the settlement of Cahokia in the Mississippi Valley. The history of the United States has many points of origin, distributed widely through time and space.

But those origins can be difficult to visualize. Rough maps of what would become the United States had been created by European cartographers since at least the 1520s, but they remained largely inaccessible: at the time of their creation, they held closely guarded secrets relating to maritime anchorages, navigational routes, and other valuable proprietary information. And even as they aged into antiques, many of these maps remained locked up in far-flung archives and private collections.

That changed, in part, with the David Rumsey Map Collection’s 2017 digitization of a beautiful and astonishingly detailed map from the 16th-century. Created in Milan by an Italian cartographer named Urbano Monte, the document consists of 64 separate sheets that, when assembled, constitute the largest-known early modern world map, at 10 feet square.

Monte seems to have had an extraordinarily good array of cartographic informants. His map covered everything from the names of towns in Japan to warnings about “spirits that deceive” roaming the deserts of Afghanistan — as well as Siberian unicorns, Mongolian sphinxes, and abundant sea monsters. And it offers a rare glimpse of a time just before British colonization in the Americas began, and the more familiar narratives of American history kick off. Indeed, according to an essay that accompanies the Rumsey Collection’s release of the map, Monte began working on his world map (or “planisphere”) on a particularly significant date for American history: 1585, the same year as the founding of the ill-fated Roanoke Colony.

The region known as “Terra Florida” had by the late 16th century become a well-known, if peripheral, Spanish colony. To the north, the colony of New France had made a small foothold along the St. Lawrence River, near present-day Quebec City. But between these two regions of “Florida” and “Arcadia” lay an enormous expanse of lands and peoples that Europeans had little first-hand knowledge of. Monte’s map makes no mention of place names that would begin to appear a few decades later, like the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam on the island of “Mannahatta” (1624) or the Jamestown settlement in Virginia (1607). But his map is not empty, either. Instead, the region between present-day Georgia and Maine is studded with long-abandoned place-names. The Maine coast is defined by a “Rio de Gato” (River of Cats) and “Capo de Molte Isole” (Cape of Many Islands). A mysterious city named “Ipedra” lies alongside a river cutting deep into the interior of the continent, somewhere in the environs of West Virginia.

Some of these place names are visible on other 16th century maps, such as the secret atlases produced in the imperial workshops of the Spanish empire in Seville. But other elements of Monte’s map are unique. For instance, he includes eclectic captions about the inhabitants of interior regions. “Here they are great runners,” he writes about a city labeled Nuremberga, seemingly near present-day Ohio. “They dress in leather.” At other points, Monte channels familiar legends. A caption north of Florida alludes to the legend of the fountain of youth (“This is not a country where life is finite”).

One striking element of Monte’s map is the abundance of indigenous American settlements that it recognizes by name. Monte has drawn and labeled cities throughout the Gulf region. Occupying the territories of the present-day states of Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas, they have names like Teschi, Suada, Mocora, Corue, and Cagnaneral. To the south, Monte has lavished attention on depicting what was then — and is still — the largest city in North America: Tenochtitlan, now known as Mexico City and labeled here simply as “Messico.”

Another segment of the map presents a rather confused picture of northern Mexico and the American Southwest. California is clearly labeled — and, unlike other early modern maps, very clearly not depicted as an island. To the north, in an area that seems to correspond to the southwestern U.S., is a crude sketch of two creatures along with a caption: “Here there are cows and bulls that have a hump like the camel, and have the appearance and tail of lions; the rest of them is similar to our Italian [cows].” In short: bison.

There are many other wonderful details throughout Monte’s depiction of the New World. Take, for instance, the humanoid sea monster pursuing a Spanish ship off the coast of Venezuela. But what’s most striking about this early depiction of North America is not its legendary beasts, but its more prosaic details. Monte’s map preserves details of peoples, cities, and places that in many cases still exist, but have histories that are too often overlooked in narratives of American history.

The two segments of the map corresponding to North America are reproduced below. Visit the David Rumsey Map Collection for higher-resolution versions. The team behind the map’s digitization has also figured out how to map the individual images onto a sphere using Google Earth, with beautiful results viewable here.

Originally published at www.bunkhistory.org on April 17, 2019.

The World As it Appeared in the 1580s was originally published in Bunk on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Two hundred years ago, it was hard for Americans to miss the message that they had a serious drinking problem.

By Benjamin Breen

In 1826, an arresting series of engravings began appearing in shops, homes, and public spaces across the 24 states of the young republic. These images depicted the downfall of American men and their families due to alcohol abuse.

One popular example, labeled “the Direct Road to Poverty, Wretchedness, and Ruin,” told the story of a young family’s ruination in four scenes. The first was relatively benign: a young father treating himself to a seemingly harmless “morning dram.” This would not necessarily have been thought of as improper behavior in 19th century America. Bitters, now known as a cocktail ingredient, were commonly used as a kind of health tonic, and drinking a shot of them in the morning was not altogether unusual.

Nevertheless, that 8 a.m. glass of bitters was how the drunkard’s march toward the grave began. In the next panel, the same man (looking decidedly the worse for wear) contemplates a glass of rum being poured in a seedy barroom. He seems to have pawned off some of his family’s clothing in order to buy more spirits.

The second half of the series concludes the tale on a predictable and grim note. The man becomes a “confirmed drunkard,” unable to function or care for his children. The bleak final panel shows the family headed to an almshouse — their former home now awaiting auction, their front yard a pigsty.

On one level, this narrative might seem familiar. Addiction has been an ever-present trope in American culture for well over a century now. It’s built into the personal legends of some of the most celebrated American artists, and narratives of addiction and recovery are ubiquitous, appearing in literature, film, and journalism.

Yet when the “Drunkard’s Progress” images began to appear in the early 19th century, the concept of alcohol addiction was still a relatively new one. In many ways, the very idea of addiction was new, a byproduct of the availability of intoxicating substances to ordinary working people. These included not only alcoholic spirits, but also novelties like cocaine wine, morphine cough syrups, and cannabis tinctures.

The images of drunkenness and addiction that began to proliferate in 19th century mass media grew out of the nascent temperance movement, which was partially grounded in Christian moralizing. But the movement also had roots in what was then a new vision of medicine that emphasized the physical action of drugs on the body and mind. It was a radical break from the thinking of earlier generations, who saw intoxication as a product of the intervention of deities or spirits, or the flux of harmful “humors” in the body.

Concerns about alcohol abuse also took on a new urgency because of the sheer amount that was being consumed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Encouraged by wage growth and the wider availability of spirits like whiskey and gin, in 1830 the average American was putting back an estimated 7.1 gallons of pure alcohol per year. That’s more than three times the average today, and more than five times what it had been, according to historian John McCusker, in 1740s Britain.

The “epidemic” of alcoholism in 19th century America stemmed from the convergence of several factors. Economic changes resulting from industrialization led to a rapid urbanization of the country and the breakage of older ties to family, profession, and place. In an echo of the current opiate epidemic, many early proponents of the temperance movement highlighted alcoholism as a harbinger of a larger decline of the social order, and framed sobriety as part of a larger spiritual and personal transformation.

Another factor was the rise of modern medicine and psychiatry. Around the turn of the 19th century, social reformers and physicians like Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia began publishing clinical descriptions of longstanding behaviors. Rush’s 1784 essay on “the Effect of Ardent Spirits Upon Man” was one of the first efforts to pathologize alcohol dependence. Rush fused Enlightenment-era medical principles with Christian moralism to argue that overconsumption of distilled spirits led to madness and depravity. This psychological approach would eventually give rise to new terms like dipsomaniac (which first appeared in the 1840s) and alcoholic (a surprisingly recent word, dating back only to the 1880s).

(Rush became such a popular medical authority that he continued to haunt the field long after his death. Later in the century, a psychic medium named Sarah Danskin claimed to have been “the pupil” of the deceased Dr. Rush’s “spirit” for a period of 10 years.)

Interestingly, the lines that were drawn by the early reformers allowed for a little wiggle room. In his 1784 treatise, Rush included an image of a “moral thermometer,” portraying the difference between alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks literally as one of degrees. Wine and strong beer were included in the section labeled “Temperance.” Contrast that with the absolutist approach to temperance taken by reformers a century later.

Although they don’t align neatly with later campaigns for legal prohibition, these stock images of the “drunkard’s progress” signaled the beginning of a longtime reliance on mass media on the part of anti-addiction reformers. Their efforts coincided with the rise not only of mass literacy, but also of new media formats and distribution venues, like signage and proto-billboards. The antebellum era ushered in telegraphs, color lithography and photography, as well as national newspapers and periodicals (some of which, like The New York Times, Harper’s, and the Atlantic, persist to this day). All of these changes helped spread the message of temperance crusaders, who often proved to be canny with the slogan and archetypal image.

It might be tempting to draw comparisons between the alcohol problem in 19th century America and the contemporary epidemic of opiate addition. But there are important differences between the two eras. Substance abuse today is still discussed in the language of medical pathology, but it is far less likely to be denounced as an indication of moral depravity. The earlier obsession with character has largely been superseded by narratives of recovery.

The Drunkard’s Progress as depicted in 19th century media inevitably led to the grave. Today, it is much more likely to lead to an AA meeting.

Originally published at www.bunkhistory.org on January 18, 2019.

The Drunkard’s Progress was originally published in Bunk on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

John Gregory Bourke’s “Scatalogic Rites of All Nations” and the American West.

By Benjamin Breen

On a November night in New Mexico, 1881, a team of Zuni dancers transformed the living room of a U.S. Army officer into a ritual site.

Ten men and two boys entered the darkened space. The dancers in the center of the group were stripped to the waist, wild turkey feathers tied in their hair, white bands of paint striping their eyes, mouths, arms, and legs. Each wore a tortoise shell rattle tied below the right knee, and each held a “wand made of an ear of corn” in their right hand. One had tied corn husks over his ears. Another was clad in “a long India-rubber gossamer ‘overall,’… with a pair of goggles, painted white, over his eyes.” A third was dressed as a young woman.

The remaining dancers, our source tells us, “were arrayed in old, cast-off American Army clothing.”

The dancers worked improvisationally, but also followed a fixed pattern. First there was a group song, “apparently a ludicrous reference to everything and everybody in sight.” Then “an outlandish but faithful mockery of a Mexican Catholic congregation at vespers.” This performance generated huge laughs from the audience of around 100 Zunis, but left the three Americanos in the room transfixed with confusion.

One of them was a cavalry officer. He privately wondered whether the dancers were specifically mocking him, and what he called his “stained glass attitude.”

Suddenly the dancers exited, and attendants sprinkled the floor with water. When the twelve figures returned, two were naked. They sang a “very peculiar [song]…. like a chorus of chimney sweeps,” and their dance became “a stiff-legged jump.” One of the three American audience members, an ethnologist named Frank Hamilton Cushing, knew his cue. Cushing stood up and announced, in the Zuni language, a “feast.” Women emerged carrying dishes of tea and sugar.

Then, to the shock of Cushing’s cavalry officer companion, another dish was produced. “An olla of urine,” which the dancers took turns drinking.

“Amid the roaring merriment of the spectators,” the officer recalled, they “announced that it was very, very good.”

The cavalry officer was disgusted. But he was also paying rapt attention. The “Zuni urine ceremony,” as he called it, was to become a life-changing obsession. When the officer reached the end of his short life, some fifteen years later, he would be remembered not only as a soldier, but also as an anthropologist.

His specialty?

The study of urine, shit, and religion.

John Gregory Bourke, a son of Irish Catholic immigrants to Philadelphia, lied about his age to a recruiter and enlisted in Union Army in the summer of 1862. He was 16 years old. That winter, he distinguished himself at the Battle of Stones River and became one of the earliest and youngest recipients of the Medal of Honor. Nominated to West Point at the end of the war and promoted to the officer corps thereafter, Bourke was sent west in 1869. Serving first in New Mexico and then in in Arizona, California and Nebraska, Bourke participated in the bloody campaigns waged by the U.S. military against the Sioux, Apache, and Cheyenne peoples, among many others.

And here his biography would have ended, were it not for the second calling that Bourke found in the pueblos of New Mexico. It was here, conversing with ethnologists like Cushing, that John Gregory Bourke discovered his new passion.

The written word had always come easily to Bourke. He had kept a voluminous diary since his Civil War days. Following the 1885 publication of Ulysses S. Grant’s wildly popular memoirs, Bourke published his accounts of campaigns against the Apaches alongside the U.S. Army’s famed “Indian fighter” General George R. Crook.

Throughout this period, Bourke was developing a more esoteric set of literary interests. Ten years after his first encounter with the Zuni dance, these interests culminated in the publication of a truly unusual work: a privately-printed book called Scatalogic Rites of All Nations.

Copies of Bourke’s book were exceedingly rare, and it merited little mention in the press. However, in 1913, some 17 years after his death, Scatalogic Rites re-appeared in a German translation. Here, in an introductory forward, Bourke’s study won approval from no less an authority than Sigmund Freud. Although the German psychoanalyst found fault with some of Bourke’s assumptions, he also saw much to praise. “To make [the role of excretion in human life] more accessible,” Freud claimed, “is not only a courageous but also a meritorious undertaking.”

But what exactly did Bourke’s undertaking amount to?

The first thing that a modern reader might notice about the book is its stilted style of writing. (Scatologic Rites has been digitized and is available for download at the Internet Archive.) Bourke’s tone was a strange combination of the lurid and the aggressively dry. We find this dichotomy on the book’s very first page, which opens with an offputtingly run-on sentence that manages to land on the term “ur-orgies”:

The object of the present monograph is to arrange in a form for easy reference such allusions as have come under the author’s notice bearing upon the use of human or animal ordure or urine or articles apparently intended as substitutes for them, whether in rites of a clearly religious or ‘medicine’ type, or in those which, while not pronouncedly such, have about them suggestions that they may be survivals of former urine dances or ur-orgies.

This dichotomy went deeper than language. Bourke seemed to embody the larger contradictions of the Gilded Age. Beneath an obsession with decorous and gentlemanly behavior lay a deep well of violence, as well as a fascination with filth. These were the dark undercurrents that would be surfaced by Freud and Jung in the following decades, just starting to be made visible.

In a working life bookended by the Civil War and the frontier slaughters of the 1870s and 80s, Bourke also embodied a distinctively American paradox. He was an unrepentant jingoist, who was at the same time highly sensitive to the complexity and beauty of the cultures that he and his comrades were in the process of destroying. In an early passage from his diary, prior to his revelatory experiences with indigenous religious practices, Bourke was unabashedly genocidal in tone. “The sooner the manifest destiny of the [white] race shall be accomplished and the Indian as an Indian cease to exist, the better,” he wrote.

But within a few years, the same hand that wrote these terrible words would begin to record close observations of people it had once worked to exterminate.

Bourke’s transformation from an avatar of Manifest Destiny to a chronicler of indigenous lifeways foreshadowed a larger shift. With the advent of “Cowboys and Indians” pulp fiction literature and the lore of groups like the Boy Scouts of America (founded in 1910), the bigotry that characterized earlier decades was reconfigured into a fuzzy frontier mythology. Bawdlerized versions of indigenous cultural practices — no longer seen as a direct threat to national interests — were taken up with gusto by children whose parents and grandparents had once reviled native peoples.

Meanwhile, indigenous and non-Christian rituals became reimagined as steps on a continuous path stretching from savagery to civilization. Bourke’s interest, at least on the surface, emerged out of this fascination with civilizational uplift. Scatalogical Rites documented not only indigenous cultures of the American West, but practices from ancient and medieval Europe as well. It was part of a larger hubris, on the part of the West, that they had left the dark, noisome, smelly, and discomfiting elements of human existence far behind them.

It was a blind spot that wouldn’t last. The translation of Bourke’s work into German appeared just months before the outbreak of World War 1. A few decades later, the pueblos and plateaus frequented by Bourke and other early ethnographers would become staging grounds for nuclear tests.

In the pas de deux between shit and civilization, it became, once again, too soon to declare a winner.

Further reading in the public domain:

• Bourke’s On the Border with Crooke, a published account of his time as an aide to General George R. Crooke during the Apache Wars.
• Bourke’s Popular medicine, customs and superstitions of the Rio Grande (1894).

Originally published at www.bunkhistory.org on September 8, 2017.

Excremental Empire was originally published in Bunk on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Why historians should stop worrying and embrace the rise of history podcasts by non-scholars.

By Benjamin Breen

Not long ago, I polled the students in one of the classes I teach at UC Santa Cruz about why they were interested in history. Many answers were what I expected to hear — inspirational high school teachers, hobbies, a compelling book or burning question that led them to other books and questions. But I was amazed at the number of students who said that they were sitting in the classroom (at least in part) because of a form of media that didn’t even exist when they were born: the podcast.

In the past few years, history-related podcasts have exploded in popularity. A format defined in its early days by informal conversations — often geared around discussions about technology, comedy, or current events — has evolved into something harder to pin down. It has become commonplace to call post-Sopranos television the 21st century successor to the serial novels of the 19th century. Perhaps a similar comparison can be made between the popular history of the past and contemporary podcasting. What is Serial if not a reimagining of the kind of long-form narrative that has largely dropped off nonfiction bestseller lists? (The word historia originally meant “an account of one’s inquiries.”)

Over the past decade, academic historians have begun to join the ranks of podcasters. These shows are worth digging into in greater detail (perhaps in a future column here). But they aren’t the ones that seem to be awakening my students’ interest in the past. I’m referring instead to a wider slate of “historically minded” podcasts that involve narratives of the past, but aren’t trying to be academic. My students, for instance, pointed to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History as an example, alongside Things You Missed in History Class and the comedy-history podcast The Dollop.

These podcasts seem to be to be tapping into a listening public who deeply enjoy learning about the past, but are not necessarily in touch with academic history as a field. The existence of an audience for shows like these is not surprising, but its size and enthusiasm should be heartening to historians. Academic history has been having a tough time. Enrollments in university history classes and history majors are declining in proportional terms. And, as the authors of The History Manifesto pointed out back in 2014, some historians also worry that they have also lost their place at the table when it comes to public debates.

So how do “historically minded” podcasts fit into this picture, especially podcasts about U.S. history? Some professional historians might be inclined to write them off — the vast majority, after all, are produced by “amateurs,” in the sense that their authors lack advanced degree in history or professional experience teaching the field.

I see this as a superficial criticism, one that conveniently ignores the relative youth of our own discipline. Was Herodotus a professional historian? Was Gibbon? Neither had an advanced degree in history, and neither taught at a university.

But if faulting podcasters for lacking professional qualifications is petty, it’s still worth noting that something important is missing from the podcast format. The “architecture” of a history book (be it print or digital) has been slowly developed over a centuries-long period to make it easy to confirm or follow up on the book’s claims. Want to read the rest of a quote, or check the accuracy of a specific claim? Just check the footnotes. Podcasts, on the other hand, have yet to develop any standard apparatus for verification, making them more susceptible to traffic in unreliable information. There’s also the issue of audio’s constraints: history is not just a textual medium, but a visual one as well.

If podcasts have certain drawbacks as vehicles for historical narrative, they also offer some massive benefits. An episode from last year of Malcom Gladwell’s Revisionist History furnishes one example. In it, Gladwell recounts his interest in a mysterious 1980s-era alteration to McDonalds’ recipe for French fries. This seemingly inconsequential topic proves to have been profoundly important. It turns out that the move was an early step in the battle against saturated fats, a dietary villain that has recently been blamed for worsening obesity rates worldwide.

It is, in typical Gladwell style, a wonkish story involving statistics about the health impacts of saturated fats and interviews with scientists. Much of the content could easily have appeared in a New York Times Science section article; other aspects, relating to the 20th century history of food science, could find a home in an academic history journal like Isis. But there’s a visceral quality to the narrative — interspersed, as it is, with evocative audio from some of the individuals involved — that wouldn’t have been possible in a written form.

Podcasts are also an ideal medium for representing what is to me an underrated element of the historical craft: the movement through fascinating places during the research process. I’ve always found the life experiences and travels that undergird a history project to be at least as interesting as the project’s findings. The traces of those experiences tend to be well-hidden, however, in published academic work. In the book Mosquito Empires, for instance, the historian J.R. McNeill includes the following as a fascinating but brief aside in a footnote relating to tropical diseases: “In the Cook Islands, I once contracted hemorrhagic dengue fever… and for a few unspeakably miserable days viewed the prospect of my own death with delirious equanimity.” It’s a detail that seems ripe for elaboration, but McNeill quickly moves on to the experiences of a medical officer stationed in Guyana in 1796. It’s not hard to imagine even this tiny footnote getting some pushback from editors concerned that McNeill was straying too far afield.

Podcasts, by contrast, have the potential to foreground the travels, conversations, and struggles of researchers themselves. Bits of acoustic ephemera that would have no home in a monograph — the crunching footsteps of a walk to a historical site, vocal quirks of an interviewee, snippets of historical footage or broadcasts — can create a sense of immediacy that is hard to achieve in print.

Probably no show has been more influential to the creators of the current generation of storytelling podcasts than This American Life. TAL’s fame — and the massive success of its spin-off shows Serial and S-Town — can sometimes make us take what its contributes for granted. It’s easy to satirize aspects of the show, particularly Ira Glass’s distinctive delivery and the over-reliance on a handful of musical cues (moody ambience from Yo La Tengo when things take a reflective turn, or the song “Rawnald Gregory Erickson III” to signal a comic segue). But over the past two decades, the show has become a treasure trove of historical narratives that come alive in a way that they couldn’t on the printed page.

More recently, The Moth Radio Hour has emerged out of a popular series of live confessional performances that draw directly on attendees’ life histories. The Moth doesn’t present historical narrative as we’d normally understand it — its stories are not research-based or even scripted, and usually do not document anything that would be recognized by historians as particularly important. But this is history nonetheless. Indeed, it embodies the discipline’s most important foundation: the personal narrative, the crystallization of lived experience in a memory, and the retelling (and recording) of that memory for an audience. I can easily imagine historians two or three hundred years in the future using The Moth narratives as primary sources. It’s a perfect example of what the podcast medium excels at: direct, visceral, humane snippets of history.

Below are a few more examples of historically minded podcasts. If you think we’ve left something important off the list, please let us know via Facebook or Twitter.

• Revisionist History
• The Moth
• S-Town
• Serial
• The Memory Palace
• The RFK Tapes
• Heaven’s Gate
• Slow Burn
• Whistlestop
• The Dollop
• History of the World in 100 Objects
• Revolutions
• Soul Music (BBC 4)
• Esquire Classic

This piece was originally published on www.bunkhistory.org on August 20, 2018.

Podcasting the Past was originally published in Bunk on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A recent photography exhibit at the Getty Center raises difficult questions about our capacity for empathy.

By Allison C. Meier

The Civil War was the first American military conflict witnessed through photography, and the medium had a significant role in the public perception of the war’s bloody cost. Alexander Gardner’s images of the Battle of Antietam, in which over 22,000 men were killed or wounded, were displayed in October of 1862 in Matthew Brady’s New York gallery. Visitors lined up to witness the prints and stereographs of mangled, anonymous corpses awaiting burial in the open air. Never before had the carnage of the battlefield been presented so plainly. “If [Brady] has not brought bodies and laid them in our dooryards and along the streets,” declared the New York Times later that month: “he has done something very like it.” But when examining this era of images, I’m haunted by what is not visible. The brutality at the center of the war — slavery — was rarely presented with the unflinching gaze Brady and others brought to bear on the battlefield. While viewers would not have questioned the humanity of the fallen soldiers at Antietam, the humanity of enslaved people had long been disregarded. Abolitionists did use photography to rally support for emancipation. Their choice of subjects, however, revealed some of the prejudices that would curtail African-Americans’ freedom following the war, in both the North and the South.

One of these abolitionist photographs, “Freedom’s Banner. Charley, A Slave Boy from New Orleans” (1864), was featured in the Getty Center’s recent Paper Promises: Early American Photography exhibition. The carefully composed image depicts a boy with one hand on a voluminous American flag, its fabric rolling out beneath his feet, seeming to consume the frame with its promise of citizenship. The caption informs us that Charley is “a slave boy from New Orleans,” and the reverse side states that the “proceeds from the sale of these Photographs will be devoted to the education of colored people in the department of the Gulf.” What is perhaps surprising to our modern eyes is that this fair-skinned, smooth-haired boy appears to be white.

Charley was one of several former slaves photographed by Charles Paxson, their images sold between 1863 and 1864 as a fundraiser for freedmen’s schools in New Orleans. Other Paxson images depict Rebecca and Rosa, also of light complexion with smoothly curled hair, posed reading books or kneeling in prayer. “What such a campaign implied, of course, was that images of formerly enslaved black children were not enough to spur many Northerners to boost their support for the war and aid freed people in need,” historian Mary Niall Mitchell wrote in a 2014 piece for the New York Times. “Indeed, these images serve as a remarkable reflection of just how much race shaped many Americans’ stake in the bloody conflict.” The Getty exhibit’s curator, Mazie Harris, explains that these images were created using the “salt print” process, which facilitated their mass distribution. “These were produced by abolitionists to share and spread images of children that were enslaved as a way of raising money for education, and that’s much more effective when you’re able to produce that in multiples.” Whereas daguerreotypes were one-off objects, often kept as a personal heirlooms, salt prints could be printed over and over from negatives. As Harris points out, “networks of communication were becoming strengthened through this horrible time.”

The photographs demonstrated that slavery was not simply a matter of skin color, but of birth. Yet in disseminating these images, there was an affirmation of color’s importance. Beneath the romantic façade of the studio settings, there was also an undercurrent of unspoken violence. As Mitchell wrote in her 2008 book Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery, “Seeing the portrait of Rebecca kneeling in prayer, for instance, a white northern audience read in her white skin a history of ‘miscegenation,’ generations of it, resulting from the sexual interaction of white masters with their female slaves.”

Some abolitionist photographs were more direct about the violence of slavery. Paxson photographed a man named Wilson, whose former master’s initials — VBM — were branded on his forehead. In Paxson’s 1863 photograph, Wilson is in profile, with harrowing reminders of his former bondage, including a spiked metal collar around his neck, shackles in one hand, and a nail-studded paddle in the other.

More famous is the photograph of a man named Gordon, who escaped from a Louisiana plantation in 1863. Photographed almost clinically by William D. McPherson and his partner Mr. Oliver, Gordon is turned away from the camera to show the dense web of whip scars on his back. Like the portraits of the children, the images of Gordon and Wilson were widely distributed, in carte de visite photographs and prints in newspapers. All of the photographs demanded of the viewer: is this the image we want of our country?

While northern activists deployed images like these as political weapons, southern photographers were creating their own form of visual propaganda. In the catalogue for Paper Promises, Matthew Fox-Amato writes about the brief moment of “plantation tourism” in photography, particularly the stereographs by James M. Osborn and Frederick E. Durbec that depicted orderly and serene scenes of slave life. An 1860 image shows enslaved people sitting side-by-side before a chapel altar; in another from the same year, we see a tombstone memorializing Janero, “an intelligent and faithful Servant to seven successive Masters.” All of these photos, which were marketed for armchair tourism, reinforced southern views of slavery as a Christian, benevolent practice, where loyalty was celebrated.

What the abolitionist and the plantation photographs had in common was that neither treated their subjects as individuals. In both cases, the power was clearly on the side of the viewer and the photographer. Not for several years would activists like Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass begin to invert this dynamic, repeatedly posing for dignified photographs that challenged racial stereotypes. In the 2015 book Enduring Truth: Sojourner’s Shadows and Substance, Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby writes: “By exploiting newly affordable photographic portraits, Sojourner Truth created a new community, another form of political persuasion, and also a way financially to support her activism on behalf of former slaves and women.” As Truth had printed on her souvenir cartes de visite, for which she kept the copyright: “I Sell the Shadow the Support the Substance.”

Finding the substance in these shadows from the past is impossible without acknowledging who was and wasn’t included in the 19th century’s most widely shared photographs. With modern eyes, it’s easy to see who was omitted from abolitionist imagery like the photo of Charley. What’s more challenging, but no less important, is to look outside the frames of the photos we’re accustomed to seeing today, and to ask whether we care more about the suffering of people who look, or live, like us.

This piece was originally published at www.bunkhistory.org, on June 12, 2018.

What the Viral Media of the Civil War Era Can Teach Us About Prejudice was originally published in Bunk on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What we can learn about trade policy from a misbegotten 19th century effort to quantify the chemical properties of wool.

By David Singerman

President Trump appears to enjoy picking fights with America’s trading partners. The pawns in his game of two-dimensional chess (if you win then I lose) are not only finished goods, like appliances or vehicles, but also raw materials and other things further up the supply chain. Thus, in March, Trump proclaimed tariffs on aluminum and steel in hopes of reviving these industries in the United States. When the Commerce Department formally announced the new tariffs, it allowed American companies to petition for exemptions if they were unable to get what they needed from domestic suppliers. Over the subsequent five months, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (motto: “Where Industry and Security Intersect”) received more than 38,000 exemption requests. Alcoa, for instance, claimed it couldn’t find enough of one aluminum alloy in the U.S., and needed to bring in aluminium from Canada.

But Commerce also allowed companies to object to others’ requests for exemptions. If a bicycle builder alleges, for instance, that there aren’t any domestic sources of quality steel tubing, steel tubing makers are allowed to insist that they do in fact sell it. Alcoa’s cousins in steelmaking — especially those, it turns out, connected to the Trump and/or Putin administrations — have filed thousands of objections, and succeeded every time.

How specifically does a company have to define its requirements to qualify for an exemption? Petitioners insist that they need flexibility. If that bike shop is forced to give a narrow chemical and physical definition of what it wants exempted, then even a normal error — an accidental delivery of better tubing — could wallop the shop with a tax bill. Domestic steelmakers, conversely, will argue that their tubes are perfectly “substitutable” and of “satisfactory quality.” In an attempt to head off these disputes, the Bureau of Industry and Security advised that a substituted product need not be “identical, but it does need to be equivalent.”

If only it were that simple. What is “identical” and what is “equivalent” are questions that tariff enforcers have been struggling with as long as there have been tariffs to enforce. In the late 19thcentury, in particular, the U.S. protected its industrial economy behind high tariffs on almost everything. The customs service became, in many respects, the most powerful organ of the federal government. Because tariffs were the primary source of federal revenue, officials of the Treasury were always nervous that merchants were playing the government like a fiddle. Commission after commission was appointed to investigate whether goods were systematically undervalued at the border.

Gilded Age officials were not the first to worry about customs fraud, nor the first to look for experts to calm the government’s nerves. By the 1880s, this search had led the Treasury Department to appoint chemists to custom house positions, under orders to ascertain the precise chemical properties of imported products. But some chemists dreamed bigger. Just as alchemists had pursued the philosopher’s stone, these analytical chemists sought scientific tests of value that could objectively determine how much a product or good was worth.

This quixotic search often produced absurd results. One particularly loopy example showed up in 1886 on the desk of the chief customs appraiser in the Port of New York. Its author believed he had developed a new tool for the U.S. government to use in its assessment of one important import: wool.

The central element of the proposal was a chart. It is a mind-bending image. A flurry of lines and arrows intersect circles and arcs, and letters and words of various sizes are scattered across the diagram as if by a typesetting malfunction.

At the time, U.S. law defined wool as “washed,” “unwashed,” or “scoured,” and assigned a tax rate to each category. These categories implied what the proposal’s author called “a history of the events connected with a parcel.” But customs officials often had no way of knowing what had happened to the wool prior to their inspection. Had the wool actually been washed or scoured, or not? This was the problem that the author proposed to solve scientifically. “Sir,” he began,

respectfully referring to the propriety of ascertaining the ‘dividing lines’ essential for the discrimination and separation of the ‘unwashed,’ ‘washed,’ and ‘scoured’ qualities of wool, I have the honor to submit a ‘suggestive chart’ as a scientific representation of the obligations which co-exist with the natural relations connected with the subject-matter under contemplation.

In other words, he would use science to derive the commercial value of wool from its organic qualities.

The proposal was signed by Dr. Haydn M. Baker, a chemist in the New York customs laboratory who oversaw its appraisal of textiles and dyes. According to a contemporary newspaper profile, Baker knew more about the composition of textiles than anyone else in America. It wasn’t clear where he had acquired his expertise, his doctorate, or his quasi-Biblical goatee; the same paper reported that “he had been a roving spirit in his younger days.” M. stood for Mozart. Later in life, he tried his hand at composing. In language as baroque as his graphics, Baker explained to his boss that his chart would eliminate the perils of “human judgment” from the evaluation of wool. First, he defined “absolutely clean wool” to be the same as “chemically pure fiber,” and then set to work with his protractor, constructing a chart that would show how to classify wool of any percentage. His goal was to derive, geometrically, the “theoretic separation” between the categories “washed,” “unwashed,” and “scoured.” After five-plus years of staring at this diagram and at Baker’s text, I continue to find it completely inscrutable. There is little reason to suppose it was received more favorably in 1886. The chief appraiser of the port forwarded Baker’s submission to the U.S. Senate, along with a simplified version of the chart as an “illustration of principle.”

Here again, Baker’s explanations are nearly impossible to parse. (“The approach, intersection, and departure of the peripheral line with and from the diagonals is the proof of coincidence and deduction.”) But between the lines and circles, one remark does stand out:

But since the operations that produce the grades belonging to each section are so variable in their effects, the said operations result in qualities which overlap the section where they belong and interlaminate with the kinds peculiar to the adjacent section.

Translated, Baker is admitting that the world of wool is fuzzier than his theoretic lines. Some unwashed wool might have more fiber than other wool that has been washed, and a batch of washed wool might have more than another that has also been scoured. Baker does not dwell on this basic problem, which bedevils all forms of classification. But he tried to represent it in his chart. Between each pair of categories, he included regions of “justifiable” disagreement, within which officers of the government might still maintain their “liberality and dignity.” He called these “zones of doubt.”

Baker drew clear lines between the zones of doubt and of certainty. But no amount of peripheral lines or coincidences could avoid the truth about interlamination. The real world is always fuzzy. And Baker’s attempt to locate absolute dividing lines is almost too neat a metaphor for the U.S. government’s attempts to solve its problem of knowledge. The comical complexity of his proposal demonstrates how desperate officials were to find technoscientific solutions to questions that ultimately depend on the judgement of human beings.

This uncertainty is an age-old problem not only for customs enforcers, but for anyone operating along what we now call the “value chain.” Some cases are simpler than others. It may not take much of an expert to figure out whether an object is a washing machine or an automobile. But many, if not most, objects of commerce have properties that cannot be objectively determined. It is precisely these properties that tend to be the ones at the center of our politics. Only human judgment can decide whether an object is really what it appears to be, or whether it’s just close enough for government work.

This piece was originally published at www.bunkhistory.org on October 2, 2018.

Zones of Doubt was originally published in Bunk on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

During the Depression, business leaders knew that public works funding was key to economic growth. Why have we forgotten that lesson?

By Brent Cebul

Democrats last week announced a counterproposal to President Trump’s blueprint for new investments in infrastructure. In contrast to Trump’s plan, which relies primarily on private financing, the Democrats are proposing a whopping $1 trillion of direct federal spending to upgrade the nation’s bridges, roads, transportation systems, and public buildings. The Democrats’ proposal is doomed to remain just that — a proposal — given GOP control of Congress. But it may signal the kinds of contrasts Democrats will try to draw with Republicans in midterm contests this fall.

These sharply opposed approaches call to mind debates over the last great flurry of American investments in infrastructure. Between 1933 and 1939, in the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal put unemployed Americans to work building infrastructure and civic assets through a range of programs that ultimately totaled about two thirds of all federal emergency expenditures. In 1933, the Public Works Administration received an initial appropriation of $3.3 billion (roughly $64 billion today), and, in 1935, the Works Progress Administration (WPA) came online with a $4.88 billion budget (roughly $89 billion today). In terms of expenditures, then (as opposed to, say, regulations), the New Deal was primarily a massive public works program.

In both popular and scholarly memory, the primary beneficiaries of the New Deal were the men who gained public employment, and the broader civic sector, which gained an unprecedented bequest of facilities and improvements. More than eight million Americans were directly employed through the WPA, resulting in some 78,000 bridges and nearly 40,000 public buildings, including libraries, post offices, and swimming pools. The Public Works Administration (PWA), meanwhile, contracted with private firms to construct massive projects like dams and major airports. Yet our recollection of New Deal works programs neglects another critical set of beneficiaries — local businesses and businesspeople. This amnesia is in part the result of modern American politics. A privileged cadre of national business elites — from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the Koch Brothers — has managed to convince the broader public that businesspeople truly want limited government, calling for private-sector alternatives to just about everything government does. This assumption has, in turn, fueled political polarization, with Republicans widely seen as aligned with the interests of the business class, and Democrats branded as the champions of government spending — however much they too have embraced market-based solutions. But the amnesia also results from scholars’ tendency to focus on an earlier generation of New Deal critics. As the New Deal expanded, elite national business associations like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers argued that expansive public initiatives, public works, public employment, and the tax dollars required to sustain them would ultimately stymie private initiative, and perhaps even snuff out the free market entirely.

At their most extreme, these elites began equating Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda with totalitarian, communist, and fascist regimes abroad. In 1940, the Republicans nominated for president the strident anti-New Deal lawyer and executive Wendell Willkie, whose meteoric rise in politics was fueled by just such claims. In his acceptance speech, Willkie contrasted his experience as “a businessman” with the New Deal’s “vitriolic and well-planned attack against” business. His campaign’s primary theme became the looming specter of “State socialism” — “complete centralized government dominating the complete economic life of the people.” “Private initiative,” Willkie said, “made America,” and faced with Roosevelt’s socialism, only “private initiative can save America.”

Frederick von Hayek, a leading intellectual celebrated by Willkie’s generation of business-conservative anti-New Dealers, argued that incremental steps toward U.S. statism was already, if imperceptibly, putting Americans on “the road to serfdom.” In their self-conception as well as their political mobilization, national business elites framed themselves and their businesses as the last, best bulwark against creeping socialism. Theirs was the true “American Way” toward democratic-capitalism and freedom.

While historians have produced many otherwise excellent histories of business and the rise of modern conservatism, their focus on figures like Hayek, Willkie, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan have tended to reproduce their subjects’ view of a yawning divide between New Deal liberals and business. This zero-sum reading of public and private initiative, past and present, continues to thrive in the modern Republican Party.

Yet the more numerous but often overlooked ecosystem of local businesspeople — very often members of local chambers of commerce, who paid dues to the national Chamber — had a wholly different and far more nuanced relationship with the New Deal. In 1939, FDR distilled this relationship in a story he told to the American Retail Federation. The president described a meeting he’d taken with an ostensibly limited-government businessperson who suggested that spending on public works could be slashed by at least half. “In every case,” said Roosevelt, “I find what I suspected. His local Chamber of Commerce, his local newspapers are ‘yelling their heads off’ to have those projects built with Federal assistance.” Local businesspeople may have agreed in the abstract with their national lobbying associations’ calls for federal austerity. But Roosevelt put a fine point on the dynamics of federalism that were in fact at play: “Consistency, thy name is geography. You believe with the United States Chamber of Commerce that Federal spending on public works should cease — except in your own home town.”

Across the country, some 3,000 local boards of trade and chambers of commerce were lying in wait with longstanding wish lists for local improvements. The Roosevelt Administration, in turn, depended on their support. “We would have been awful damned fools,” said Works Progress Administration director Harry Hopkins, “… if we thought for a minute that we have either the power or the ability to go out and set up 100,000 work projects as we are going to have to do, probably 200,000 before the year is over, without the complete cooperation of local and state officials. We couldn’t do it if we wanted to.” New Dealers understood that the fastest way to roll out these programs was to tap into this vast ecology of local business leaders. These elites became instrumental in the securing and administration of public works programs. In Cleveland, Ohio, for instance, the WPA’s district office was overseen by a former railroad executive and leader of the local chamber. In Philadelphia, business leaders pioneered a system of hiring unemployed lawyers, engineers, and draftsmen to planning committees for infrastructure and works projects. Their system of employing white-collar workers to generate business-minded works programs was emulated in New York, Chicago, Cleveland, and Columbus. Business and civic leaders in New York eventually produced a report that praised New Deal works programs as having given “a material stimulus to the business of the city.” At the same time that the U.S. Chamber was characterizing federal works programs as a reckless endangerment of the free market, local chambers recognized these projects as a critical stimulus for development.

The hunger for infrastructure spending was particularly strong in the nation’s less developed regions. In December 1937, the Southern Secretary, a trade magazine for southeastern Chambers of Commerce, published a Christmas “wish list” of items submitted by 76 local chambers across the south. Roanoke, Virginia’s Ben Moomaw hoped for “a fine new municipal airport.” In Ocala, Florida, Horace Smith needed “an athletic field, an air mail passenger line, a municipal auditorium, and a five-year agricultural program — a whale of an order, I’ll grant.” In Houston, Bill Blanton desired “a flood prevention program, finishing up the airport, a street improvement plan, four-lane highways, more conventions and industries.”

What these businesspeople knew, especially in the capital-starved south, was that federal investments in infrastructure, federal agency outposts, and with the coming of war, defense, was anything but a zero-sum game. The infusion of fresh capital that accompanied these projects offered much-needed economic escape velocity. Assets like pipes and sewers might seem humdrum, but for cities in rural or underdeveloped regions, a modern water system could be the key to recruiting new industries. In port communities and bigger cities, digging deeper channels into river beds and canals could allow for passage of large modern ships, and thus establish connections to global markets. As a rural South Carolina chamber member exclaimed, such improvements could “mean empire building to us.” In just the handful of years it was up and running, the PWA built 384 airports; completed over 3,000 sewer and water projects; and constructed more than 7,000 educational buildings. Hundreds of local civic projects were completed — everything from city halls, police stations, and court houses to parks and libraries — the kinds of municipal assets local chambers loved to highlight when recruiting new businesses to town. The WPA, meanwhile, constructed or improved some 4,000 airport buildings, laid down nearly 6 million linear feet of runways, constructed tens of thousands of miles of road, and made improvements to more than 4,000 miles of river banks and shorelines. The many iconic projects these agencies underwrote include LaGuardia Airport, the Blue Ridge Parkway, Los Angeles’ Griffith Observatory, and the Hoover and Grand Coulee Dams. Some New Dealers saw these local partnerships as much more than a pragmatic expression of mutual interest. For a fleeting moment, they imagined formalizing them into a national system of federally-funded, locally-administered initiatives. But as the nation emerged from war and faced a period of inflationary prices, budget hawks in Congress joined with national business elites to hack back the key agencies that might have put American infrastructure and public works on surer footing. In the ensuing decades, the federal government continued to subsidize local infrastructure. But this spending would no longer be administered by a non-partisan or bipartisan agency. Instead, it became a creature of Congress, where it was more and more discredited as simply the workings of the pork barrel — no matter how valued much of the spending may have been.

Perhaps the biggest win of the national business elites, however, was in defining how the New Deal would be remembered. As the Cold War set in, they downplayed what had been widespread if decentralized consensus about the value of public spending, cultivating instead the notion that in sturdier economic times, Roosevelt’s statism threatened to snuff out economic liberty. This zero-sum appraisal of the New Deal failed to account for the ways in which investments in infrastructure and civic assets had formed a foundation for the expanding postwar economy.

The Trump administration’s renewed calls for infrastructure investments largely reinforce this zero-sum view of public-private initiative. As the President put it in his State of the Union address, his plan would “build gleaming new roads, bridges, highways, railways, and waterways across our land,” but it would do so with a vanishingly light federal footprint — perhaps as little as $100 billion of his proposed $1.5 trillion in investments would come from the federal treasury. The rest would be subsidized through private investments stimulated by state or local subsidies raised through the bond market, tolls, fees, and other local revenue sources. The administration argues that this approach would jumpstart the economy of the future while avoiding the supposed inefficiencies and bureaucratization of the past.

There are two main problems with the administration’s plan. First is that state and local governments are generally more constrained in their ability to spend than is the federal government. Indeed, as a variety of commentators have pointed out, those local or private sources of funds are wholly inadequate and almost certain not to materialize on the scale imagined. Privatization, furthermore, would likely increase infrastructure costs for the public over the long term.

But the second major problem is more conceptual: the administration’s plan treats public investment as somehow at odds with private initiative, with jobs created through federally subsidized public works programs less “real” than jobs created in the private sector. This notion flows from generations of business leaders who have spun fictions about public investment failing to stimulate sustainable economic growth, adding to our tax burden, and further bogging down the economy. It is a misreading of history that continues to be propagated by influential business conservative organizations like the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, which entirely rejects the possibility of paying for improved infrastructure by raising public revenues.

As the historical record shows, in the depths of the Great Depression generous federal spending was not only not a threat to private initiative. Businesspeople themselves understood that the jobs it created and the infrastructure it built were essential to jumpstarting private business and industrial growth. If Democrats today are serious about their proposals for a new round of massive public investments, they would be wise to relearn and champion this history.

Originally published at www.bunkhistory.org on March 12, 2018.

Infrastructure is Good for Business was originally published in Bunk on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A roadside marker program in New York State embraces the gray area between official history and local lore.

By Allison C. Meier

One day in the early 19th century, a woman was killed with a silver bullet shot through her kitchen window in Esperance, New York. In some versions of the tale, she had made local cattle disappear, caused crops to fail, and was able to walk on water. In others, she was a French woman, widowed by a Napoleonic Wars soldier and unable to speak English. She was shunned, called a witch, and eventually, the local people voted on her murder. They buried her upside down, with a stake in her head. An evergreen tree was planted to mark the grave. Or so the story goes.

It’s dark lore for a town whose name means “hope” in French. Yet a year ago this week, on New York’s Route 20, the Esperance Historical Society dedicated a sign to the “Esperance Witch.” It was the latest addition to the roster of Legends and Lore Markers, meaning that the story’s murky details did not get in the way of official commemoration.

Since 2015, the Legends and Lore Marker Grant Program has funded over 35 roadside signs commemorating New York folklore. A partnership between the William G. Pomeroy Foundation and the New York Folklore Society, the program offers grants to municipalities and nonprofits to document folklore in their communities. Red and tan markers — very similar in shape and style to the blue and yellow state historical signs that were mostly erected in the 1920s and ’30s — are adorned with a stargazing moon. Instead of describing Revolutionary War battles or famous figures’ birthplaces, the new signs offer accounts of witchcraft, spectral encounters, eccentric hermits who danced for pennies, and other unexplained phenomena. One stands outside the Goshen Courthouse, regaling visitors with the tale of Claudius Smith, a “reputed Tory marauder” hanged there in 1776. (Allegedly his skull is still in the masonry over the courthouse door.) Another, on the outskirts of Canaseraga, recounts the “hairy women” first sighted in 1926, who fled into the forest and lived there like wild creatures. Travelers along Route 29 may notice a sign for “Spook Rock,” where a “beautiful Indian maiden” and her lover from an opposing tribe rest. When church bells ring, the rock — the story goes — turns over, and the star-crossed lovers appear.

Ellen McHale, the New York Folklore Society’s executive director, believes that the Legends and Lore program can give people a valuable glimpse into the kinds of stories that had currency in previous generations. “It doesn’t necessarily show up in the historical record,” she says, “but it’s really a story about the community itself, and it’s important to recognize those stories that people tell about themselves.”

In 2016, the Friends of Long Point Park put up a Legends and Lore marker to the “Phantom Indian of Conesus Lake,” a hoax by a boat tour operator named Colonel S. Toohey. Between the 1920s and 1970s, Toohey earned local fame in the western edge of the Finger Lakes by offering tourists glimpses of a ghostly apparition (played by a person in costume decorated with phosphorescent paint). Another 2016 sign in Ossining’s Sparta Cemetery commemorates an 1880s figure known as “The Leatherman,” who for “no known reason” walked a 365-mile loop every 34 days between New York and Connecticut dressed in 60 pounds of leather. The Town of Brookfield unveiled a marker in 2017 for the Gorton Lake Turtle. It reads “As Tom Dorsey cleared land his wagon load of huge rocks couldn’t be moved by horses. A giant turtle surfaced and dragged [the] wagon into the lake.”

The stories commemorated by these signs, in many cases, offered explanations for people, and things, that seemed inexplicable. They also served as warnings. A marker at the “Thirteen Curves” near Syracuse tells drivers of a woman who still searches for her groom, both killed on their early 1900s wedding night. The ghost story is a reminder of the dangers on this serpentine road. Near Rolling Hills Asylum in Bethany, a sign describes “spirits believed to still roam,” recalling the real suffering of 19th-century mental patients.

The legends aren’t all supernatural. A sign at a Wayne County bed and breakfast relates lore of the former farmhouse’s role as a site on the Underground Railroad. A Kinderhook sign recognizes local schoolteacher Jesse Merwin as an inspiration for Washington Irving’s Ichabod Crane in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” The Legends and Lore program does not require proof that these events actually transpired, only that the stories about them have some verifiable origin. “We don’t want someone that has a commercial establishment to make up a ghost,” McHale explains.

“There’s often historical truth at the heart of every legend,” says Paula Miller, executive director of the William G. Pomeroy Foundation. “The folklore and legends of each community are, of course, unique to them and their own past, but the common thread is that the stories are woven into the community’s history.”

In this sense, there is perhaps less separating the red and tan markers from the more traditional blue and yellow ones. Official markers, which emerged in the early 1900s and had a postwar boom during the heyday of the road trip, have become ubiquitous alongside American roadways. George Washington slept here; the Civil War was fought here; Mark Twain lived here. They are presented as truth, but were created by groups or individuals with their own interests in deciding which stories are — and aren’t — cast in metal. And the products of their decisions have for years played a role in forging our myths about what it means to be American.

There are also myths that take on the trappings of “history” through the very act of being memorialized. Take the numerous monuments to Christopher Columbus, which can in part be traced back to the figure being popularized by Washington Irving. (In addition to imagining headless horsemen, Irving penned a largely fictional 1828 biography of the explorer, infusing Columbus with the bravery and independent spirit that the still-young country wanted to see in itself, and perpetuating the fiction that Columbus was the first to challenge the flat-earth theory.)

The Lost Cause mythology that still shapes many people’s understanding of the Civil War is another example of myths that were reinforced by granite and cheap bronze. In the first two decades of the 20thcentury, with Jim Crow taking shape and the Ku Klux Klan ascendant, and then again during the Civil Rights era a half-century later, these myths took solid form across the American South as groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) and Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) installed hundreds of monuments to Confederate leaders. The timing was no accident, and assertions of white supremacy were front and center at many of the monuments’ dedication ceremonies.

Might the Legends and Lore signs help to highlight, in their own unexpected way, the ever-shifting basis of all of the history that we commemorate in our public spaces? Maybe. But they are also a lot of fun. And while there might be some concern over, say, giving the tale of a giant turtle pulling a wagon of rocks into a lake the same status as a presidential birthplace, these eccentric markers can contribute to a richer understanding of the past, and how today’s communities came to be. Recognizing oral history and folklore in our public monuments reminds us that all history is told and retold, often changing and growing in the telling.

Originally published at www.bunkhistory.org on October 23, 2018.

Legends and Lore was originally published in Bunk on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the height of the Cold War, the NSA created a series of posters to keep its secrets from leaking. They’re both wonderful and creepy.

By Benjamin Breen

When the National Security Agency released a cache of its vintage security posters earlier this year, one of the things people keyed in on was the goofiness of the whole enterprise. Take for instance the poster contrasting the moon with a filing cabinet, encircled with the words “Before you worry about OUTER SPACE, worry about THIS SPACE.” Or the Thomas Kincaid-like scene of a snowbound cottage with “Security is always in Season” inscribed beneath, in a font that looks more suited to a Christmas card from grandma than to a warning not to commit treason.

But beneath the corniness, there’s something harder-edged. Browsing the collection of 1950s-1970s images, what struck me most was not their kitschiness, but rather their uncanniness. Where other advertising of this era set out to sell things, these images were designed to make viewers more careful, conscientious, dutiful, loyal — even a bit scared.

The posters (released in response to a Freedom of Information Act Request by the website Government Attic) were produced by the NSA’s Security Education Program, and apparently posted in NSA offices in an effort to make employees more “security conscious.” Similar images, it turns out, were being created at the same time by the NSA’s Soviet counterparts.

In both cases, the goal wasn’t simply to inspire pride among agency employees, or even to inspire patriotism. It was to give viewers the distinct impression that they were being watched, that their actions were being held in the balance. But to me, there’s something about the NSA posters that feels different, and somewhat more unsettling. It’s the way that they combine government propaganda with the language and aesthetics of a vanished world of mid-century American print advertising.

Print ads at mid-century had a set of distinct features. One was their diction and typography, which merged telegraphically peppy clichés with Emily Dickinson-style dashes and ellipses: “You can give this sparkling drink to babies — and without any qualms… Seven-Up has a special fresh, clean taste that appeals to everyone at your house — be he nine months, nine years or ninety.”

Another was their commitment to a specific, highly romanticized vision of American life. They spoke to a nuclear family that was Christian, white, and traditionalist. The NSA posters trafficked in this vernacular, making frequent reference to Christmas, babies, and churches.

It’s hard to imagine the NSA launching a similar campaign today. And that’s not only because of what could be charitably called the agency’s recent public relations challenges. It’s also because the print culture that helped define the look of the 20th century United States has passed into history. When was the last time you saw a poster — a real poster, not a sign that says “Employees must wash hands” or the like — in a place of business?

And when was the last time you truly stopped and paid attention to an ad in a printed newspaper or magazine? Appealing to consumers in print has become such a foreign practice that Don Draper and company come off as kitschy, despite the Mad Men actors playing them straight.

The visual vernacular of mid-century print advertising, of course, is still recognizable today. But it’s almost exclusively deployed in satirical versions of the aesthetic’s earnest former self. Smiling faces, well-coifed hair and lawns, space age flourishes. A happy dog in the corner, a shiny car in the background. Whiteness abounding. What once signaled wholesomeness has been repurposed by artists like Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons to highlight the contradictions of our times.

This, perhaps, is why the NSA posters seem so strange to us today: they look somehow fake, as if they were the tongue-in-cheek creations of a 2010s graphic designer. The historical lineage reaching back to the earliest state broadsides and patent medicine advertisements has culminated in… irony.

Radio and TV helped reduce the centrality of these sorts of images. The internet has basically killed them off. If the NSA posters were to be duplicated today, on a functional level, they wouldn’t be posters at all. They’d be a carefully worded email, a message broadcast to a Slack channel, or a targeted ad on Facebook or Twitter.

Public posters and print ads were not an American invention. But the strange demands of public life in the 20thcentury US — the combination of consumer-friendly optimism and deep-seated apocalyptic fear — made them distinctive, even weird. We’ll never see their likes again.

Originally published at www.bunkhistory.org on October 5, 2018.

Mum’s the Word was originally published in Bunk on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Each day at Bunk, we comb the internet for the most interesting American history-related articles, essays, videos, podcasts, conversations, maps, and visualizations. We’re particularly fond of content that explores the connections between present and past. On our website, you’ll see some of the ways these stories intersect with each other across theme, space, and time.

Below, you’ll find some of my favorite pieces from 2018. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did.

-Tony Field (Editor, Bunk)

Local History

As Goes the South, so Goes the Nation [Imani Perry, Harper’s]
A Thanksgiving trip home to Alabama occasions this tour de force through the state’s twisted past.

Honorable Mentions:
The Little Mayors of the Lower East Side [Laurie Gwen Shapiro, Lapham’s Quarterly]
In the Hate of Dixie [Cynthia Tucker, Bitter Southerner]

Legal History

Black Lives and the Boston Massacre [Farah Peterson, The American Scholar]
Do you know the story of Crispus Attacks, the black man who was the first American casualty of the Revolutionary War? If so, it’s probably incomplete. In this compelling essay, a law professor explains why, and what the omissions have to do with the struggle for racial justice today.

Honorable Mentions:
Separation of Power [William Hogeland, Lapham’s Quarterly]
No Law Without Politics (No Politics Without Law) [Jedediah Purdy, Law and Political Economy]

Narrative History

The Train at Wood’s Crossing [Brendan Wolfe, brendanwolfe.com]
The long-forgotten story of a Charlottesville lynching is unearthed in a lyrical and deeply researched piece of writing that twists together strands of personal, local, and national history.

Honorable Mention:
The Counterfeit Queen of Soul [Jeff Maysh, Smithsonian Magazine]

Religious History

Evangelical Fear Elected Trump [John Fea, The Atlantic]
Fea, a scholar and practitioner of evangelical Christianity, offers a nuanced take on four centuries of people “failing miserably at overcoming fear with hope, trust, and faith in their God.”

Honorable Mention:
The Fight to Define Romans 13 [Lincoln Mullen, The Atlantic]

Reported History

We Saw Nuns Kill Children: The Ghosts of St. Joseph’s Catholic Orphanage [Christine Kenneally, Buzzfeed News]
A devastating longread based on years of interviews with alleged survivors of systematic abuse.

Honorable Mentions:
Payback [Natalie Y. Moore, The Marshall Project]
A Cool Dip and a Little Dignity [Erin E. Tocknell, Bitter Southerner]

Labor History

A Culture of Resistance [Charles Keeney, Lapham’s Quarterly]
The teachers’ strikes that sprang up around the country last year caught many observers off-guard. Here, Keeney explains why labor activism in red-state West Virginia is not the anomaly it may seem to be.

Honorable Mention:
Where Did it All Go Wrong? [Gabriel Winant, The Nation]

Watery History

In the Dismal Swamp [Sam Worley, Popula]
As is the case with each of the honorable mentions below, this piece defies the terra firma of historiographical categorization, combining currents of environmental, cultural, political, and local history into a profound exploration of what it means to “drain the swamp.”

Honorable Mentions:
The Water Next Time? [Danielle Purifoy, Scalawag]
The First Floridians [Jordan Blumetti, Bitter Southerner]

Historical Reenactment

Natural History in Two Dimensions [Whitney Barlow Robles, Common-Place]
Another fascinating genre-buster that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know — and then some — about the lost art of fish-flattening.

Honorable Mention:
Revisiting an Explorer’s Northwest Passage ‘Disappointment’ After Nearly 230 Years [Brian Castner, Atlas Obsura]

Museum Review

Real Museums of Memphis [Zandria Felice Robinson, Scalawag]
A gut-punching portrait of Memphis by a daughter of the city, written from the shadows of the National Civil Rights Museum on the occasion of MLK50. “[W]e have to keep track of how our memories and experiences are being gentrified in a notion of progress that has no meaningful proof or original referent.”

Honorable Mention:
Our Nukes, Ourselves [Kelsey D. Atherton, The New Inquiry]

Debunk

How Social Media Spread a Historical Lie [Jennifer Mendelsohn & Peter A. Shulman, Made by History/Washington Post]
When an erroneously captioned photo of a KKK march went viral, the authors sprung into action, correcting the record and explaining how Google, Wikipedia, and other digital platforms amplify the falsification of the past.

Honorable Mentions:
The Myth of the Criminal Immigrant [Anna Flagg, The Marshall Project]
We’re Never Going to Have Our “Have You No Sense of Decency, Sir?” Moment [Rebecca Onion, Slate]

Obituary

An Obituary for Orange County, Dead at Age 129 [Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times]
A clever use of the form to give historical context to Southern California’s midterm election results. “The death shocked everyone who hadn’t bothered to pay attention for decades.”

Honorable Mention:
Larry Eisenberg, 99, Dead; His Limericks Were Very Well Read [Margalit Fox, New York Times]

Reputation Revision

Living With Dolly Parton [Jessica Wilkerson, Longreads]
Wilkerson grew up in East Tennessee idolizing the region’s most famous native daughter. Now a historian, she sets out in this lyrical, personal piece to more fully understand Parton’s enduring appeal in the post-industrial South.

Honorable Mentions:
Why Tamika Mallory Won’t Condemn Louis Farrakhan [Adam Serwer, The Atlantic]
Paul Bremer, Ski Instructor: Learning to Shred With the Bush Administration’s Iraq War Fall Guy [Aaron Gell, Task & Purpose]
My Fellow Prisoners: On John McCain [George Blaustein, n+1]

Origin Story (Culture)

Bad Boys [Tim Stelloh, The Marshall Project]
A fascinating piece that chronicles the unlikely story of ‘Cops,’ one of television’s most successful, influential, and polarizing shows ever.

Honorable Mentions:
How Auto-Tune Revolutionized the Sound of Popular Music [Simon Reynolds, Pitchfork]
The Story Behind the Poem on the Statue of Liberty [Walt Hunter, The Atlantic]
My Dad Painted the Iconic Cover for Jethro Tull’s ‘Aqualung,’ and It’s Haunted Him Ever Since [Robert Silverman, The Outline]

Origin Story (Trumpism)

How Do We Explain This National Tragedy? This Trump? [T.J. Stiles, Zyzzyva (via Lithub)]
There was no shortage of contestants to this category in 2018. And while no single account can do justice to all the factors responsible for our current moment, I especially appreciated Stiles’ personal, wide-ranging, and not altogether pessimistic approach to the question.

Honorable Mentions:
Trumpism Before Trump [Robert L. Tsai & Calvin Terbeek, Boston Review]
The Religion of Whiteness Becomes a Suicide Cult [Pankaj Mishra, New York Times]
The Roots of Trump’s Immigration Barbarity [Daniel Denvir, Jacobin]

Origin Story (Plastic)

American Beauties [Rebecca Altman, Topic]
Before Americans had to learn to reuse their grocery bags, they had to learn to thrown them away. Behold one of my favorite pieces of the year, chronicling the rise and fall (hopefully not in a tree near you) of the plastic bag.

Honorable Mention:
Disposable America [Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic]

Commentary (Reconstruction’s Legacy)

Today’s Voter Suppression Tactics Have A 150 Year History [Gregory Downs, Talking Points Memo]
There was a ton of terrific writing this year about Reconstruction, but this one stood out. It widens the lens on the story of disenfranchisement, explaining that “though rebels perfected the art of excluding voters, it was yankees who developed the script.”

Honorable Mention:
Citizens: 150 Years of the 14th Amendment [Martha S. Jones, Public Books]

Commentary (Historic Preservation)

The Archivists of Extinction [Kate Wagner, The Baffler]
The said archivists are none other than the contributors to a Flickr page devoted to images of defunct Kmarts. If that seems intriguing to you, I promise you that it is. Come for the Kmarts, stay for the withering critique of capitalist destruction.

Honorable Mention:
The Death and Life of a Great American Building [Jeremiah Moss, New York Review of Books]

Commentary (80s Movies)

In the Dark All Katz are Grey: Notes on Jewish Nostalgia [Samuel Ashworth, Hazlitt]
With what is probably the finest opening line of any on this list, this piece is a poignant meditation on nostalgia, the Borscht Belt, and why Dirty Dancing is actually a Jewish horror film.

Honorable Mention:
Brett Kavanaugh Goes to the Movies [Marsha Gordon, The Conversation]

Commentary (Covert Operations)

Did You Know the CIA ______? [Malcolm Harris, n+1]
In this review of Errol Morris’ latest miniseries, Harris examines the inability of Americans to confront the crimes that have been committed in their name. “If cold war is the name for the third world war that didn’t happen, what’s the name for what did?”

Honorable Mention:
The U.S. Needs to Face Up to Its Long History of Election Meddling [Peter Beinart, The Atlantic]

Commentary (Statue of Liberty)

Sentinel [Francesca Lidia Viano, Places]
To read about the Statue of Liberty’s origins is to become ever more aware of the contradictions baked into America’s most cherished symbols. I highly recommend chasing this read with the Slate piece below, which pushes the story forward into our crazy modern times.

Honorable Mention:
Who Does She Stand For? [Paul A. Kramer, Slate]

Commentary (Futility of War)

A Hundred Years After the Armistice [Adam Hochschild, New Yorker]
A standout in a year full of WWI retrospectives. Among other things, Hochschild tells us that more soldiers were killed after the Armistice had been signed than would die on D-Day in Normandy 26 years later. They died, in other words, for no political or military reason whatsoever.

Honorable Mention:
Remembrance of War as a Warning [Christopher Preble, War on the Rocks]

Commentary (Country Music)

Canon Fodder [Shuja Haider, Popula]
Another fun read from Popula, on policing the genre boundaries of popular music. If you’ve ever winced to hear somebody say that they like all kinds of music ““except rap and country,” then this one’s for you.

Honorable Mention:
Agriculture Wars [Nick Murray, Viewpoint]

Periodical Single Issue

Boston Review, “Fifty Years Since MLK” [Forum V (Winter 2018)]
Just in time for the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination, Boston Review published a knockout of an issue that was, in many ways, the perfect antidote to Dodge’s Superbowl ad from a few weeks earlier. Every article is a must-read.

Honorable Mention:
The Baffler, “Tramps and Millionaires” [Issue №42]

Recurring Series

Overlooked [New York Times]
An ongoing effort by the Times’ obituaries desk to remember the lives of notable women who were left out of the paper of record the first time around.

Bibliography

Confederate Monuments Syllabus [Kevin M. Levin, Civil War Memory]
If there’s one person up to the challenge of keeping track of the latest skirmishes in the Confederate monument wars, it’s Levin. He recently compiled this wide-ranging collection of online resources in an effort to help teachers and students make sense of it all.

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Published on January 8, 2019.

Best American History Reads of 2018 was originally published in Bunk on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.